Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Saturday, December 8, 2012

Benjamin Netanyahu's Last Stand

Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi’s) out of this world strategy for
dealing with the Palestinian bid for recognition at the UN General Assembly
(GA) requires further examination.

On the one hand the Israeli electoral system creates
stability for the leadership of the governing party. If they enjoy the
confidence of their paid up membership they can say and do what they want and
the only requirement to maintaining power is exercising a sufficiently
imaginative negotiation to achieve a coalition agreement. The downside to successful
completion is lack of respect for the electorate.Success encourages dictatorial behaviour by
the leadership; tact and vision do not come as part of the package. Because this system is so
successful it is arguably the best advertisement the world has against the
proportional representation system.

To discuss the logic behind Bibi we must first look at Israel as a
nation.It is a country that was created
around a deeply felt animosity towards religious observance. Israel in 1948
could easily have slipped into the Soviet camp. It did not, but has instead
retained a schizophrenic attitude that has progressed in recent decades from
antipathy towards religion into what we would label today, embarrassed
tolerance. A recent survey revealed 55% of Israeli Jews in favour of keeping
religious laws. The issue is that for a majority of Jews in Israel, Judaism
is cultural and this will remain so until the state separates religion from
formal state sponsorship.Shimon Peres
had a religious wife but he refused to publicly exploit this for the ‘good of
the party’ – something that is done worldwide in all political systems.Bibi has no such ethical qualms. He has
appeased an ultra-orthodox political leadership that is at best ambivalent
towards contact with the secular community; a fractured community that is
structurally tribal and excludes any one with whom they marginally
disagree.This is not the way to build a
state.

Nor has the Left ever displayed behaviour that was not
congruent with this collaborationist model of behaviour. To quote Alan Johnson “A Principled Bid in the
Upcoming Israeli Election” (World Affairs Journal 29 November 2012) “…Labour’s
leader (Shelly)Yacomovitch makes warm noises toward the settlers and invites
the electorate to vote their wallets. She offers no vision for Israel’s
future relations with the Palestinians..”

In order to understand the Israel-Palestine conflict we
have to contextualise it. If we view the conflict within the larger picture of
Judaism and Islam then what emerges is a war that must be fought on an entirely
different canvas.

But the West is frightened to confront anything that is
based on religious differences. When Samuel P. Huntington published “The Clash
of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” – he was hailed as a prophet,
someone whose ideas would change the world. And then the politicians got hold
of his book and wholly condemned it. The world’s leaders were eager to deny its
central thesis which was: Conflict today is not primarily about access to food
or water or land but it is about ideas. The main proponent of hegemonic
religious activism is Islam and its theology is diametrically opposed to modern
Western thought on almost all issues of morality.

The only way that peace will come to the region is to
address Arab/Muslim actions over the centuries and the prevalent attitude of
hatred, discrimination and theologically inspired ethnic conflict. But Israeli
politicians, like their Western counterparts, are incapable of addressing the
subject, although more so because of their recent militantly secular history. Israel is at the fault line of this
clash of civilizations. Because of Israel’s modern history it hovers
between indifference and antagonism towards framing the conflict thus.

Israel’s
enemies deny any kind of Jewish contact with the Land, they reject any
historical or current affiliation and in every international forum they argue
against the legitimacy of Israel
as a Jewish or any other kind of nation. And it is this prejudice that Israel
has never addressed either at home or internationally.

Which brings me to the next point:Raphael Lemkin coined the word as well as the
concept of ‘Genocide’.Irvin-Erickson
wrote (“The Romantic Signature of Raphael Lemkin”) “Lemkin defined nations as
“families of minds”…. Lemkin intended the word ‘genocide’ to signify the
cultural destruction of peoples, which could occur without a perpetrator
employing violence at all. In his 1944 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin
wrote that genocide was “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the
destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the
aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” A colonial practice, genocide had
two phases: “One, the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed
group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.”

When we consider
pan-Arab Muslim colonialism as an ideological imperative then Palestine is but a pawn in an ongoing battle
and one that we ignore at our peril. The Arab world and its non-Arab Muslim
allies commit cultural genocide as theologically justified behaviour. It furthers
their expansionist religious ideology and rewards the select faithful with
unlimited economic power that barely trickles down through the cultural or
political elite. It is the classic Marxist definition of exploitation.

And yet the Global Left caters to their prejudices as if no
religiously inspired agenda exists.

Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) received his degree (doctorate)
from a Soviet era University.
His degree thesis was denial of the Shoah. People change.Communist officials became SS officers and
after the war they were recruited to both Eastern and Western intelligence
agencies in spite of the copious amounts of blood they had on their hands.People change.But you must first provide them with a reason
to change and Israel
has never given Abu Mazen the reason for him to change from the political bigot
he is. As chairman of the Palestinian Authority
he rejects the existence of the State of Israel and the two-state
solution. A post he placed on his official Facebook page on October 13
2012 stated his intention to apply to the UN General Assembly for recognition
of Palestine as
a non-member state.

He wrote: “The recognition (of the UN) will not liberate
the land on the day after, but it will prove our claim that our land is occupied
and it is not disputed land.”One
Israeli newspaper explained it thus:“Abu
Mazen states explicitly in the post that he is not only referring to the Judea
and Samaria territories that Israel occupied in the Six-Day War, and over which
peace negotiations are being conducted, but “this applies to all the lands that
Israel occupied before June 1967,” meaning the State of Israel within the Green
Line”.

We have to understand that cherished (even bloodthirsty)
ideas are not easily forsaken.

The Koran with its mantra of finality, the attendant
pan-Arab lust for power at all costs, these are both seductive and comforting.
Their anti-Western song can soothe the soul.Immanuel Kant described the enlightenment as the freedom to use ones own
intelligence. Leftist philosopher Michel Foucault in the “Sovereign Enterprise
of Unreason” celebrated the Iranian revolution of 1979 because it would
contribute to the destruction of enlightenment principles.If
observation of the natural world led to conclusions that were correct for that
time then reason became an end in itself and not necessarily connected to
morality or ethics. And hence the seductive pull of rejecting Western thought
and returning to more ‘authentic’ but spiritually profitable times.

The Koran is the problem not because it is inherently
genocidal but because it may be interpreted any way that achieves the aim of
the translator.

At least one of my Jewish ancestors faced excommunication because
they made changes to the order of service / accepted meaning of text.The bible is more or less immutable,
unchangeable.Millions of words have
been written AROUND the text in order to explain it, interpret it, and re-interpret
it in light of changes in the modern world. A whole industry of exegesis exists and has
done so from the very beginning of faith.Christian and Jew tread carefully around the text and yes, both have
their fundamentalists who believe the world to be no older than 4,000 years
(Jews) or 2,000 years (Christians).

But Islam is the only faith that allows every bigot and
mass murdering psychopath to interpret the word of God in THEIR image.The challenge for western Muslims is to
undergo a Reformation that fixes for all time the text of the Koran in a way
that is neither offensive to Jews or Christians nor for that matter, threatening
to anyone else of faith.The challenge
is to prevent an open interpretation of the Koran that justifies continuous
warfare against the infidel and mass murder as a viable option of religious
faith.

And how does this connect with Bibi Netanyahu and the
Palestinians? Because all of us have difficult challenges in fighting the
intolerance of our own fundamentalists.

On October 25th 2012 in a popular Israeli newspaper
(Yediot Ahrononot) influential Rabbi Shlomo Aviner stated that “a woman cannot
serve as a Knesset member. It is immodest.”Taken to its logical conclusion all women must be banned from public
life –anywhere in fact that is not in the home. Aviner is considered to be one of Israel’s
spiritual leaders.So when he referred
to breaches of the rules of modesty that were liable to occur if women were
found to be in a public place, people listened.In Israel,
a war is being waged for the soul of the people.There are two mutually exclusive national religious
trends – the first integrationist and the second isolationist. Israel also has
its extremists.

And what did Bibi do – nothing.It is typical that he would steer clear of
any statement that offended his potential political supporters, even when they
are misogynistic religiously inspired Neanderthals.

This is Israel’s
problem.Palestine will only negotiate when it has
something to lose and time is not on its side.Israel
can only negotiate when it displays the clarity of vision to find its own path
to peace with its enemy.

Mohamed Morsi,President
of Egypt, was recently seen on Egyptian television saying a clear ‘Amen’ to a
Muslim prayer that instructs the Muslim faithful to commit genocide against the
world’s Jews.There can be no excuses for
this. Only a fool will believe that what starts with one nation ends with one
nation. This is the leader of the world’s most populace Arab nation inciting
his people to mass murder.

Nor can we pretend that Hamas are interested in Peace with
Israel
or that the separate Palestinian Authority (the putative State of Palestine) is
anything other than a supercessionist, racist and antisemitic conspiracy in
progress.The latest ‘big lie’ is that
the Jewish people are colonizers in their own land; the other ‘big lie’ is that
Islam is a religion of peace.Unless
Bibi is willing to confront those twin ‘big lies’ that also now underline western
attitudes to Israel there is little hope for an Israeli future. I apologise to whoever said this but to quote
them “There is an iron law in history. Appeasing xenophobic movements or
totalitarian regimes invariably lead to disaster, encouraging escalating
demands to levels which either culminate with surrender or make armed conflict
inevitable” and “President Reagan, besmirched by liberals as a warmonger,
assumed a hard line position against Soviet expansionism which led to the
collapse of the Evil Empire”.

So we need a carrot and stick approach to politics. And Bibi possesses the intelligence but not
the courage to challenge the bigots at home or the bigots abroad. It is only by
challenging the current narrative, both at home and abroad that we will be able
to work out a liveable solution for all peoples in the area.

Did Israel
over-react to the UN Vote?Of course it did
and no it didn’t. The Israeli government lost an opportunity to be the first to
vote in favour of the resolution – in fact it should have sponsored the
resolution.It could then draw out the
obvious glaring discrepancies between the Islamic/Arab/UN position on Israel and their
treatment of other nations to explain why trust is absent from any discourse on
a permanent settlement of the conflict. Ongoing Islamic and Arab hostility, the
hypocrisy that Israel
faces internationally, ‘the big lies’ – all should be brought up at every
international forum. Israel
was obliged by common sense to seize the moment. With every possible diplomatic
opportunity Israel
fails to take the initiative.

Part of this, as I have previously shown, is due to a
total breakdown in appreciating the religious inspiration for the conflict.In part it is due to secular Israeli
antipathy towards engaging in a debate about religious issues.

The reality is that Israel is wholly engaged in supporting
both the PA and the theocratic fascist and racist Hamas regime.Israel will pay the PA’s debts
because if it does not the PA will collapse and the security forces in the PA will
go unpaid.Hamas and other groups will
pour into the vacuum that is left behind and Israel
will have another Gaza on the West
Bank. Israel
has already ceded de facto recognition of Gaza’s
regime because it is in its interest to do so. A low profile is kept for
ideological and electoral reasons.

So it is all about talking to the electorate and educating
our friends about the multiple threats as we perceive them to be. And for what ever inexplicable reason that few
can fathom either inside or outside of Israel, the Israeli political
establishment is incapable of drawing on this narrative.

And construction? It is part of the failure to address
Arab bigotry that instead, the government is punishing Abu Mazens' supporters
not Abu Mazen.It is far easier to
alienate Israel’s ‘friends,’
to energise and invigorate its enemies than to come up with a visionary
approach that challenges Israel’s
enemies.